Here are two quotes from around the blogosphere. The first was posted by Liberal Pastor in a discussion that I’ve also been involved in on a biochemist’s blog:
Joining this debate late. I am one of those liberal Christians. I do not in any way believe in a supernatural God. Am I an atheist? Perhaps I will take a crack at addressing the issue in another reply.
I wanted to comment more specifically on how it is possible to call oneself a Christian and not believe in a supernatural God. It is simple; I find the way of life and the vision of the human Jesus compelling. I seek as much as possible to pattern my life after him. That makes me a Christian.
For the last two hundred years there has been a serious effort in the field of biblical scholarship to discover who was the real Jesus – as a human. This scholarship has always recognized that the gospel accounts are not historical works on the life of Jesus – they are theological reflections on the significance of Jesus which also happen to contain bits of remembered history about him. The scholarship has sought to separate the man from the myth.
For many of us, the question is: what was it about him that caused those who were with him to look at him and say: this is God among us. Since they lived in a world that believed in a supernatural deity, miracles, virgin births of great leaders, etc., it is not surprising to realize that they used that language to talk about him. (Just as Seutonius did in writing the Lives of the Twelve Caesars – in fact it has long been recognized in scholarship that the gospel writers were also writing “lives” as a counter-story to this kind of writing.)
But why write about the peasant Jesus? Was it all a fraud? Or was there something about the way he lived and died that made people talk about him with God language?
I think there was something about him. Just as there was something about the Buddha that made his followers reflect on his significance in the language of their culture and become followers. They were, Jesus and Buddha, in their day, transformational figures.
For me, it is the way of Jesus that matters: peace, simplicity, inclusive community that ignores cultural barriers, taking a stand against injustice to the point of being willing to pay the price (there are some things that are worth living and dying for), etc.
Was Jesus also wrong about some things? Almost certainly. He was a man. It is quite possible that he shared the end-times views of many people in his day and believed that God was about to intervene. He may have even believed that his actions were going to help usher in that moment. If so, he was wrong, just as countless humans have been through the ages.
It is not a deal-breaker for me, because I don’t believe in supernatural deities or humans who can do supernatural miracles or be dead and then come to life again. It is what he got right that matters to me. And I am not alone among Christians. I am where (or in the neighborhood of where) most liberal Christians are, which is why the God argument for us is a bogeyman. It sells books for some scientists and I guess makes them rich, and it fires up the fundies and gives them another excuse to keep the fires of fear raging, but it misses the point. We live in a real world with real problems, and addressing those problems and making the world a better place is what liberal Christians care about.
The second, from Philip Blosser, is shared by Michael Samson on the blog Rome Is Where The Heart Is, is about the Protestant approach to Scripture the canon of which was defined by the Church:
The honest Protestant Bible student has little ground for easily presuming that his private interpretation of the issues that divide the Protestant denominations is necessarily the right one, or that the 2000 year-old consensus of millions of Catholics on every inhabited continent is necessarily wrong. It would be untoward ignorance to assume that he is the first person in history to have carefully examined Scripture; and presumptuous arrogance to assume that he is the first to have understood it. Where was the Holy Spirit for these two thousand years? What about the centuries upon centuries through which the Christian faith was preserved, passed down from generation to generation, and carried by missionary monks to our barbarian ancestors in Europe? What about the millenia of godly champions of the faith, such as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Pope Leo, Pope Gregory, St. Benedict, St. Anselm, St. Bonaventure, St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis Xavier (the first missionary to Japan), and John Henry Newman, for starters? What about the early bishops who personally knew the apostles, like Ignatius of Antioch (the third successive bishop of that city), and who claimed to have had passed on to them the delegated authority of the apostles to stand in their place as divinely commissioned guardians and interpreters of the apostolic faith, and passed on this conviction (together with this claim of authority) from generation to generation through the laying on of hands? What about the popes and bishops who settled the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the early Ecumenical Councils, who declared “This is orthodox” and “That is heterodox,” “This is canonical” and “That is not,” and preserved and passed down the Bible and the the meaning of its message to us? Were they all mistaken in their “Romish” beliefs? Were these all partially confused, partially misinformed, partially benighted unfortunates who lost their way under the bondage of Rome, until, at last, with the advent of the modern Protestant Bible student, with his NIV Study Bible and Zondervan Concordance and CD-ROM Bible Dictionary, the light of truth has finally dawned?
One quote from a Conservative Catholic, the other from a Liberal Protestant. Presumably there’ll be something here that is thought-provoking for just about everyone!
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